Northwestern Russia historical timeline

This region contains both the oldest and the newest of Russia’s historic centres.

Novgorod

From the ninth century, Veliky Novgorod controlled trade between the Baltic and the interior and grew into a republic governed by an assembly of citizens that hired and dismissed its princes. It traded with the Hanseatic League, escaped the Mongol invasions that devastated the rest of Rus, and left birch-bark letters showing widespread literacy including among women and children. Moscow absorbed it by force in 1478, and Ivan the Terrible massacred the city in 1570.

Saint Petersburg

Peter the Great founded a city on captured Swedish marshland in 1703, moved the capital there, and forced the nobility to build in it. It was designed as a European capital and staffed with Italian, French and German architects; the cost in conscripted lives was enormous.

Revolution

The February and October revolutions of 1917 both happened here, and the capital moved back to Moscow in 1918.

The siege

Between September 1941 and January 1944 German forces encircled the city for nearly 900 days. Somewhere around a million civilians died, most of them of starvation in the first winter. It is the defining event of the city’s modern memory and is commemorated everywhere.

The Solovetsky camp

The monastery on the White Sea islands, founded in the fifteenth century and one of the wealthiest in Russia, was converted in 1923 into the first camp of what became the Gulag system. It served as the model and the training ground for what followed, including the forced labour that dug the White Sea canal through Karelia in 1931 and 1933 at an enormous cost in lives. The monastery is again active, and the site is both.

Since

The name reverted from Leningrad in 1991, and the region has been the country’s main Baltic outlet since.